An AMD internal memos hows the AMD Phenom 9700, 2.4 GHz processor is slated for mid-December availability. Allocation for the Phenom 9600 running at 2.3GHz has been pushed back to a Q1 2008 date.

The Tech Report, in an interview with AMD's desktop product marketing manager Michael Saucier, confirmed an erratum for all Phenom processors that will cause the system to hang due to an L3 cache miss. The Tech Report claims this fix will degrade performance as much at 10%.

The mainboard favored by AMD, the MSI K9A2 Platinum is impossible to get currently since it is out of stock. MSI confirmed to DailyTech that this board will start shipping again next week, and that the board itself is not with any defect, but just in high demand and low availability.

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Are we talking about a BIOS fix, which is supposed to be available ASAP? Or are we talking about the re-release of the 9700 and 9600? I would imagine the reemergenece of the Phenoms in December/January would be those processors corrected without performance penalty.

The BIOS change is a workaround (with performance hit), the actual fix will be available in a later processor stepping (presumably without the performance hit).

In other words, it seems like it would be smart to avoid the "beta" Phenoms they're initially releasing into the market, unless the 10-20% makes no difference to you. (The 10-20% figure comes from the linked article.)